


Good Omens(TV) And The Ineffable Plan

by PlaidAdder



Series: Good Omens Meta [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 00:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19415092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: Behold, everyone: the deep dive into Good Omens theology that nobody wanted!I was driven to write this. I don’t know why. Possibly because one of the first novels I ever tried to write was about a pair of (female) angels who were best friends in heaven until one of them joined the rebel angels and fell. Anyway, of course the A/C relationship is the heart of the story; but I got interested in the theological contexts that the Good Omens miniseries creates/uncreates/deconstructs/reconstructs around it, so here we go.Please be advised this whole post is based on the TV series. Nearly everything I'm talking about here was either augmented or invented for the TV adaptation. I’m particularly interested in the decision to cast Frances McDormand as the voice of God. Because that highlights an interesting question often asked by queer people who were raised in some version of Christianity: Is God an asshole? Or, to elaborate: Is God as much of an asshole as the Christian church I was raised in makes God out to be?





	Good Omens(TV) And The Ineffable Plan

Behold, everyone: the deep dive into Good Omens theology that nobody wanted!

I was driven to write this. I don’t know why. Possibly because one of the first novels I ever tried to write was about a pair of (female) angels who were best friends in heaven until one of them joined the rebel angels and fell. Anyway, of course the A/C relationship is the heart of the story; but I got interested in the theological contexts that the Good Omens miniseries creates/uncreates/deconstructs/reconstructs around it, so here we go.

Please be advised this whole post is based on the TV series. If you are a Book Purist, move on, there is nothing here for you. Nearly everything I'm talking about here was either augmented or invented for the TV adaptation. I’m particularly interested in the decision to cast Frances McDormand as the voice of God. Because that highlights an interesting question often asked by queer people who were raised in some version of Christianity: Is God an asshole? Or, to elaborate: Is God as much of an asshole as the Christian church I was raised in makes God out to be?

Because, to be blunt, when it comes to Christians, the more of an asshole any given Christian seems to believe their infallible and omnipotent God to be, the more certain that Christian tends to be that God is male. The Good Omens(TV) universe seems, for most of the series, to be very much predicated on the kind of Christianity which normally assumes, nay, demands a God the Father. And yet, McDormand’s initial voiceover identifies her as God, and when Aziraphale refers to God in the third person in the final episode, he calls Her She. So what does this mean?

What, you might ask, does “asshole” mean in a theological context? Well, for me, it refers to a God who behaves in ways that are at best utterly indifferent to and more often manifestly unfair and cruel to humanity. Good Omens(TV) gives us many examples of this. Both demons and angels in the Good Omens(TV) world conceive of God as authoritarian, arbitrary, and hyperfocused on power struggles and vanquishing the Adversary. The human world is, from this point of view, created purely in order to provide an occasion and a site for a proxy battle between the two Great Powers. To the extent that this view of God is confirmed outside of the characters’ subjective assessments, that happens primarily in the segments based on the book of Genesis, especially the Noah’s Ark sequence. Crowley is genuinely appalled at God’s plan to drown nearly all of creation, and Arizaphale doesn’t seem very comforted by his own arguments about how this fits into the Ineffable Plan. 

But God’s initial narration suggests that their perceptions may be inaccurate. The universe looks like a hot mess, she implies, only because we don’t know her ineffable plan. Visually, we are constantly told that God is playing not dice but poker, a game which does have elements of chance but in which skill, self-control, strategy, and inscrutability are ultimately more important. Humans, on the other hand, invented three-card Monte (or the shell game, or whatever you want to call it), which is purely and intentionally deceptive.

Both of these conceptions of God have strong precedents in British literature. The war-in-heaven narrative—the one Michael, Beelzebub, et al. have bought into–derives from Puritanism via Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ , in which Milton’s official view is that God has all of the qualities of an asshole but is actually not one because he’s God (in Milton’s universe, God is definitely male). Many later readers, most famously perhaps William Blake, have taken the view that unofficially, Milton is really on Satan’s side, God representing a tyrant and Satan representing the rebels, which was how the Puritans thought of themselves. Certainly most post-Puritan readers of _Paradise Lost_ have found Satan a more engaging and interesting character than God. On the other hand, the idea of an ineffable plan that would render the world good and just, despite the constant evidence of injustice, suffering, and meaninglessness that it furnishes to us, was a favorite of eighteenth century philosophers and is satirized in Voltaire’s _Candide_. It is presented, and endorsed, quite straightforwardly in Alexander Pope’s _Essay on Man_ , which argues that what we perceive as wrong with the world is just an effect of our own limited perspective, and that we should stop criticizing God until we can see the world from his (again, in Pope, God is 100% a Him) perspective, which will be never, so we should just accept that “Whatever IS, is right.” Pope was Catholic; his cosmology is conservative and hierarchical. God is at the top, then come the angels, then man, and so on down what came to be known as the Great Chain of Being. To attempt to change your place in the Great Chain—to move yourself up above your predestined station, or push yourself down below it—is not only impossible, it’s foolish and sinful.

So both of these ideas are in play in _Good Omens_ , and both of them get folded, spindled, and mutilated in multiple ways. The _Good Omens_ universe follows numerous twentieth- and twenty-first century literary precedents in reimagining the Great Chain of Being as a Kafkaesque nightmare—a headless, inefficient, inhuman, meaningless bureaucracy in which any chance for a meaningful or happy life is inevitably ground up. Hierarchies still exist—in both Upstairs and Downstairs, there is an organizational chart, with well-defined ranks and chains of command—but Downstairs is a cubicle hell of demoralization and stagnation, while Upstairs we have a succession of besuited corporate underlings striding through the unnecessarily vast and unnervingly empty atria of deserted Late Capitalist office building. The core value that Upstairs and Downstairs seem to share is competition; each side derives meaning from defeating the other, and from not much else. The architecture and the activity persist, but the purpose, if purpose there ever was, is lost. This loss of purpose seems to be connected to the withdrawal of the Almighty into complete inaccessibility. Satan manifests (though his one scene can’t possibly have justified the amount of money they must have had to pay Benedict Cumberbatch) within the story world. But after Adam and Eve are expelled, God (as far as the characters are concerned) never does. The closest Aziraphale ever gets is Derek Jacobi’s floating translucent face promising that “what is said to me is said to God.”

While I’m at it, let me observe that one of the theologically interesting things about the Good Omens(TV) cosmology—given its obvious indebtedness to Milton and to Revelations—is the decentering of Jesus, part of whose job (in Christian theology) was to make God accessible to humans again. In the Miltonic war in heaven, Jesus is central—in fact, God’s announcement that Jesus is henceforward higher than the angels is what pisses off Lucifer and eventually leads to the rebellion. Milton even wrote a sequel to _Paradise Lost_ called _Paradise Regained_ in which Jesus is the protagonist, and eventually defeats Satan during the temptation in the desert. But in Good Omens(TV), Jesus’s death is presented as a historical event; the question of his relationship to (or consubstantiality with) the Almighty is not discussed. Nor is the fact that Christ is the only reason there’s an Antichrist, or the fact that the Antichrist’s job (according to Revelations) is to bring about the second coming of Jesus.

Aziraphale presumably once enjoyed communion with the Almighty, just as Crowley and company did before they were fallen. And yet, the Almighty’s intentions have evidently always been obscure, not just to humans, but to the angels. Aziraphale and Crowley’s first conversation suggests that neither is now or will ever be entirely sure what the spiritual content and/or consequences of their interventions actually are. Even after the apocalypse is averted, we’re still not really sure. Was giving the original Adam and Eve the flaming sword a bad thing, because it wound up creating and/or serving War? Or was it a good thing, because it ultimately allowed Pepper to destroy War? Was giving Eve knowledge of good and evil a bad thing because it led to humanity’s being cast out of the garden? Or was it a good thing, because it ultimately allows humans to prevent the angels’ Armageddon? Is the answer always “both”?

So in the midst of all this mindless antagonism and meaningless machination, Aziraphale and Crowley have turned their enforced competition into something that actually _is_ meaningful—for them. Both maintain some faith in their respective ‘sides’—Aziraphale does believe in the power of love and the Ineffable Plan; Crowley seems to really enjoy inventing new forms of torment as long as it doesn’t rise to torture—but both have grasped the absurdity of the Great Plan in a way that their colleagues haven’t. They realize somewhere around the Middle Ages that they’ve been “canceling each other out,” and formalize their sense of the futility of it all in the Arrangement. In this peculiar collaboration, they build up a repertoire of shared memories and shared pleasures that turns into what is, by Apocalypse time, the only initimate, mutual, generative relationship that either of them has with anyone or anything (with the possible exceptions of the Bentley and books). The metaphor their colleagues use for what’s happened to them is “gone native,” but in fact what’s happened is that each has transferred to the other the attachment he was supposed to have–and perhaps once had, but can no longer have–to the Almighty. This seems to be something they’ve learned through their immersion in the human world, which, whatever its drawbacks and limitations, is at least _present_ to them and responsive to them in ways that their respective orders, principalities, and supreme commanders are not.

So one way to read what happens at the end of Good Omens(TV) is that Aziraphale and Crowley, with the help of the group of humans surrounding the new Adam, manage to save humanity and “The World” from destruction at the hands of a set of assholes who are all morally bankrupt, regardless of which side they’re on. This would tend toward the conclusion that God is an asshole; after all, if God weren’t an asshole, why would Gabriel, Michael, and most of the other angels be such assholes?

But if that’s true, then why break with tradition and cast God as a woman? If it isn’t to prove that women can be assholes too (a possibility) or to alienate evangelical viewers and prevent them from turning Good Omens into the Left Behind series (also possible, and even likely), maybe it’s to let us know that the God of Good Omens(TV) is not in fact the God of Milton or Pope or Revelations. The story that everyone else has been acting out didn’t come from her; maybe it was a misreading of a story that did come from her, or maybe it was generated by the angels and demons themselves without any real input from Her. If we look at it that way, then Aziraphale and Crowley’s general ineffectualness makes them both closer to God than any of Aziraphale’s colleagues. After all, it’s hard to imagine why an omnipotent God would give Aziraphale this assignment if She actually wanted it _done._ By abandoning and eventually outright sabotaging the Great Plan, Aziraphale and Crowley have always been working (without knowing it) toward the accomplishment of Her Ineffable Plan.

And what is that Ineffable Plan? I have a theory:

Aziraphale and Crowley, regardless of what they _thought_ they were doing, have actually spent 6000 years solving a problem that, as of the book of Genesis, God could not solve Herself: how to save humanity _without_ destroying it first. Aziraphale mentions, somewhat obscurely, the New Covenant that God will make with humanity after the Flood: God sends the rainbow as a promise that God will never wipe out the whole human race again. And yet, humanity deteriorates; their worst impulses are given free rein; the earth itself is degraded by their greed and shortsightedness; the whole experiment is becoming unsustainable. The Apocalypse, had it taken place, would have been a second Great Flood, in which fallen humanity is wiped away so that the righteous can begin a new world with the second coming of Jesus. But because the Apocalypse is thwarted—by Crowley’s botched hand-off, by the resulting misdirection of demonic attention, by the ordinary loving family in which Adam is raised, and by the friends Adam has chosen and the way they have taught him that nothing worth having can be coerced, by Crowley and Aziraphale’s final moments with Adam, and by Adam’s final rewriting of his own narrative—humanity can be _renewed_ without being “purified.” This renewal embraces disobedience, failure, fallenness, weakness, cowardice, getting it wrong, and making mistakes, along with the human courage, loyalty, and compassion manifested by so many of this cast of characters on their way to Doomsday. If you love anyone—even if you’re a demon—even if you’re the last of the Witchfinders—then you can be part of this renewal. You don’t have to be righteous, you don’t have to be the Elect, you don’t have to like God or even believe in Her. The only people excluded from it are the angels and demons who prefer their own bullshit Great Plan, even after its dramatic smash-up, to the Ineffable one that continues to unroll around and beyond them.

So in that reading, God is not the asshole here. The assholes are Gabriel, Beelzebub, Michael…basically everyone in the angelic/demonic hierarchies who can’t understand humanity for what it is: something more complex, more ambiguous, and ultimately more important than they are. Angels and demons alike are “straight” in the more abstract sense of the word: rigid, binaristic, hating deviation and complication. Aziraphale, Crowley, and the world that grows up around the new Adam is, again in the abstract sense, queer.


End file.
